Homegrown smartphone repair shops blossom in Twin Cities

Shatterbuggy's owner Matt Endress uses a soft brush to clean tiny shards of broken glass from the screen of a heat shield Tuesday as he repairs Jessica Harner's iPad mini in her Minneapolis home. The replacement of shattered iPhone and iPad screens (among other repairs) has become a booming business for homegrown companies offering affordable rates. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)

The 2013 Smart Car that serves as the Shatterbuggy. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)

As she picked up her Apple iPhone 4 after it had tumbled onto the concrete, Maggie LaMaack knew it was bad -- very bad.

"You pick it up with that sinking feeling in your stomach," the Minneapolis woman said, recalling the shattered screen. "You know it's going to be expensive to replace."

Well, maybe not so much.

LaMaack considered her screen-replacement options and, like many other iPhone owners, went with a homegrown repair outfit instead hitting a local Apple store.

A couple of hours and about $80 later -- less than what Apple charges -- her iPhone was as good as new.

Business is booming for mom-and-pop tech repair shops.

Operations with names like iDoctor, Gophermods, iFly Repair and DontDitchItFixIt have appeared by the dozens in the Twin Cities in the past few years.

Many report a steady stream of work despite having so much local competition -- and national rivals such as iCracked that offer mail-in device-repair.

"The market here is huge," said Matt Endress, who makes electronic device house calls in an elaborately decorated Smart Car minisedan as a local franchisee for Shatterbuggy. "We're not trying to capture all of that market."

In many ways, the service harks back to the early days of the Minnesota-born Geek Squad, which Best Buy absorbed in 2002.

With hundreds of millions of iPhones, iPads and other Apple touchscreen devices out there, and plenty of klutzy users, there seem to be more than enough broken screens and other repairable device maladies to go around. To some extent, these services also fix non-Apple devices, such as Samsung Android phones.

Shatterbuggy,with its we-come-to-you service, is offering a new spin on phone and tablet repair. Other such entities, ranging from modest one-person operations to prominent chain outlets such as World of Wireless, typically have customers go to them.

So does Apple.

The tech giant has begun offering $149 in-store screen-repair services on one of its current-model smartphones, the 5c, CNN Money reports. It already performs such repairs on its year-old iPhone 5, but not yet on the current-model iPhone 5s nor the 2-year-old model 4s.

Before offering such in-house screen-replacement service, Apple shipped phones to an off-site repair facility at a cost of $229.

But Apple fees are too expensive for some consumers with shattered iPhone screens.

The first time Manny Munson-Regala's 19-year-old daughter dropped her phone and broke the display, he had a World of Wireless outlet do the repair work.

"They did an adequate job" for $150, he said.

Munson-Regala thought he could do better, though. So, when his daughter shattered her iPhone a second time, he consulted Yelp online for a list of homegrown repair shops.

Twin Cities iPhone Repair of St.

A heat gun that reaches 900 degrees is used to detach the adhesives that keep the iPad mini together. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)

Louis Park charged him $80, he said, yet the company owner was "meticulous and a really nice guy."

"We dropped off the iPhone, went to get coffee, and when we came back in two hours, it was done," Munson-Regala said.

Similarly, Shatterbuggy aims for customer loyalty. It sets specific times to meet customers in offices or coffee shops, rather than offering cable company-like time "windows," which require the customer to wait around for the technician's arrival.

Along with its usual iPhone screen repairs, it also fixes touchscreen iPods and soon will offer on-site iPad screen replacements.

Endress' uncle, Ben Head, started the company two years ago after finding himself in the United Arab Emirates with a broken Apple phone and 30 days to figure out what to do about it. He had the required parts shipped to him and learned how to repair it himself.

Head recently began doling out franchises. The first two are in the Twin Cities and Las Vegas. He aims for 34 additional franchises in 2014 and 108 in 2015. Endress will still have the Twin Cities to himself, with the flexibility to add staffers as required.

Shatterbuggy isn't the only iPhone-repair firm with come-to-you service. San Francisco-based iCracked has three Twin Cities-based technicians who also make house calls to fix iPhones, iPads and iPods.

"For the more adventurous customer, we also sell do-it-yourself kits complete with tools and a proprietary flowchart," iCracked spokesman Jack Murphy said.

LaMaack, meanwhile, has shattered her iPhone again. This time, both the screen and the device's glass back shattered. But she knew exactly what to do.

She dropped off the phone at a now-familiar Gophermods outlet in Minneapolis and retrieved it later. The store even gave her a $130 deal for the dual-panel replacement.

"They have done a really good job on my stuff," said LaMaack, who now has her phone in a rubbery protective case.